NED KELLY AWARDS 2022 SHORTLISTS: Australian Crime Writers Association

The Australian Crime Writers Association (ACWA) has announced the shortlist for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards.

The shortlisted titles in each category are:

Best debut crime fiction

• Sweet Jimmy (Bryan Brown, A&U)
• Shadow Over Edmund Street (Suzanne Frankham, Journey to Words Publishing)
• Cutters End (Margaret Hickey, Penguin)
• Banjawarn (Josh Kemp, UWA Publishing)

Best true crime

• The Mother Wound (Amani Haydar, Macmillan)
• Larrimah (Caroline Graham & Kylie Stevenson, A&U)
• Banquet: The untold story of Adelaide’s family murders(Debi Marshall, Vintage)
• A Witness of Fact (Drew Rooke, Scribe)

Best international crime fiction

• Case Study (Graeme Macrae Burnet, Text)
• The Heron’s Cry (Ann Cleeves, Macmillan)
• The Maid (Nita Prose, HarperCollins)
• Cry Wolf (Hans Rosenfeldt, HarperCollins)

Best crime fiction

• The Enemy Within (Tim Ayliffe, S&S)
• The Others (Mark Brandi, Hachette)
• You Had it Coming (B M Carroll, Profile Books)
• The Chase (Candice Fox, Bantam)
• Kill Your Brother (Jack Heath, A&U)
• The Family Doctor (Debra Oswald, A&U)
• The Deep (Kyle Perry, Michael Joseph).

Established in 1995, the Ned Kelly Awards are Australia’s oldest, most prestigious awards honouring crime fiction and true crime writing. ACWA reported that in 2022 ‘it was particularly pleasing to see authors breaking away from some of the more common crime tropes, with a large variety of characters, settings and social diversity in this year’s entries’.

The association expects to announce the winners in approximately one month.